


The Wolf's Daughter

by fire_is_my_happy_place



Series: Myth Shorts [5]
Category: werewolf myths
Genre: Death, Non-Graphic Violence, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 11:26:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4833623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_is_my_happy_place/pseuds/fire_is_my_happy_place
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The tale of the only woman to defy the wolf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wolf's Daughter

He came to me like a nightmare, clothed in beauty, his sharp teeth waiting for me to follow. He called me the daughter of heaven, his black eyes spangled with stars beneath his braids. His voice was the slow dance of tumbling rocks that may be felt more than heard and erupts into violence. He was beautiful, and dark, and wild.

Can you blame me for following him?

It doesn’t matter which bar we were in. All bars are only the closets in which we hang, racked in the hope of each other’s attention. It doesn’t matter what we were wearing, or what I said, or what I thought he meant, or that his smile was dizzying and I felt like I had seen the face of god when the pulled me out into the night by my hand, as if love itself had come down to claim me.

I have learned him since, and how little he cares for such things. I thought him seeking sex, and was all too ready.

He bit me, mouth with too many teeth, jaw pushing out with the terrible scrape of bone reforming, my blood pouring out around us. Then he laid me in the parking lot, between two cars, and licked my forehead. I did know what I was seeing. Unconsciousness, like a tunnel, closed around me before I had time to cry out for my lost mortality.

I woke in a tight metal box. They had already removed my heart but I could feel it beating stubbornly, battering the glass jar that housed it with the only urge that transcends us all: survive. I kicked the door and the woman in her scrubs jumped. I could hear her, could hear her writing, the smallest scritch against paper. I heard her mug squeal with her chair and then shatter. I heard her steps as they scraped the floor and the crisp click of the handle as she opened the door.

She pulled me from my cold drawer hungry, but I could not eat her. When she fell over the table trying to get away, I sat up and tried to talk. My jaw was too long and tongue too ignorant for human words, and she would not have listened if I had. Instead, as she scrambled out of the room, I wavered on new legs.

In the darkness of the drawer I had not seen it, the fur that covered me. I was the color of fertile soil, dappled with cream on forearm and shin, on fingers too long and nails too sharp to belong to hands, and toes too short and webbed to belong to feet. My chest had a hole in it. As I looked down, it could just see the faint lace of stars.

My heart still beat in that jar. She had been studying it. It yearned toward me. It terrified me.

The stars burning in my chest were cold, too cold, and I picked up the jar. It was my flesh, and I could not bear to leave it.

There was a locker room but I could not see the point in clothes. I had a muzzle. No one would mistake this body for another human.

I was most fortunate that the hour was late and in her desperation, the woman had left behind a keycard, still clipped to her discarded sweater. I swiped my way out of the building, fumbling with new hands at the slick sides of the card.

The morgue had been given a garden, if a few trimmed trees and a sickly bush may be called that. I crouched in them, clutching the jar, and tried to understand.

He found me there, in his man shape, but I was not fooled. He smelled like sulfur and bitter tang of old piss, his shadow making a humped shape from the false lights above our heads. When he reached for me, I snapped at him, my teeth grinding together before I had time to think it.

 _He murdered me_.

The secret was so simple! Who could have known that it was our dreams that made us?

No child of hate is ignorant of its invisibility. Before I had grown to a woman’s shape, I had learned that we see what we want: a woman in a child, an opportunity in safety, a yes despite a no.

Who could have known that this is what we have done to the world?

I had only to dream myself a body and I could pour myself into it. I dreamed of myself that night, two legs and the ignorance of hope, and it became so.

He led me to a car and clothed me, but I would not give him my heart.

We met for the first time beneath the full moon, unable to go home. Tall and short, Black and White, Native and Mexican, and a single Korean, though I suppose there’s no point in telling us thus. He tore us from everything but our memories, made us dream-flesh where once we were alone. If we had wanted, we could have walked the world as anything or anyone.

I do not know how we all did not go mad when we realized it. Our flesh was our home, for all that it took from us.

It was there, beneath that moon he told us what he wanted, and what it would mean.

I was not the only one to still have my heart, beating away in a jar. We had only to burn it, you see. We had only to free ourselves of memory to become the hunters he meant us to be.

I have been many things, but never so foolish that I could not hear what lay underneath. He sought children in the face of extinction. He sought hunters of men.

And women.

And children.

Until their dreams fade and ours has eaten it up.

It was our hearts that trapped us thus—not wolf nor man, he said, but dream. Dreams may fade when there are not dreamers.

He lit the fire, a pyre laid carefully these many miles from town. I had wondered what he wanted with it.

We all wondered. I could feel them, like fingers brushing mine but barely, trembling on the edge of thought. I could feel some angry, revenge a lust in them as strong as spirit. I could feel some in their fear who would bend because they must.

I will not.

They could feel that, as well, and they opened around me until I stood looking at him.

They could not feel why. Does it matter that I saw the face of my niece? Does it matter that I saw the face of the woman who had wished me well, the night that I died?

I told him no.

It is why I died as they streamed to the fire and threw their hearts in it. He tore out my throat then knelt to speak to me.

 _Had I known_ , he said, _I would never have picked a hero_. He laid a gentle hand on my head, smoothing back my sticky hair. _Survival takes a coward_.

A thing he forgot in his rush: what we know to dream may be. I escaped into it, those stars in my chest that still burned, bearing my heart before me.

I escaped into the dreams of men as they threw my body into the fire.

I am waiting for him there.


End file.
